MDR Provider for MSPs Huntress Tracks Down $18 Million Funding Round

Huntress, a provider of SaaS-based managed detection and response (MDR) capabilities for MSPs and VARs, brought in an $18 million funding round this week. The company plans to ramp up its product engineering and development with the new funds, while also expanding into new market segments and geographies.

Huntress has been steadily expanding over the past four years, with more than 1,000 MSPs using its MDR solutions, which protect nearly half a million endpoints. The company attributes the growth to an increase in cyberattacks on SMBs, which often lack the advanced cybersecurity tools and resources to combat them.

“While working at NSA and cooperating with FBI, we saw firsthand how attackers establish persistence in systems, either waiting for the opportune moment to attack or selling access as part of a full-fledged business model,” said Kyle Hanslovan, CEO of Huntress. “We wanted to make threat detection available to small businesses, who are under attack just as much as large enterprises. We call it cybersecurity for the 99 percent. We believe that the best way to effectively reach these businesses is by enabling and empowering the channel.”

The Huntress model delivers its solution to MSPs, which in term offer MDR protection to their SMB clients as a managed service. The company has also made its offering easy to use with the idea that junior technicians at MSPs can readily deploy and manage it for their customers.

Huntress is unique in offering a cloud-delivered approach to MDR with a focus on detecting malicious footholds and attacker persistence. The company’s offering determines whether an attacker has gotten past preventative layers at a customer site, then alerts a technician. IT also offers a playbook of actions that may be taken to handle the threat.

“Many of these cyberattacks have grown in sophistication and SMBs are demanding advanced capabilities from their IT and security providers to defend themselves,” said Ernie Bio, vice president of ForgePoint Capital, which led the funding round. “To meet this growing demand, the Huntress team built an accessible MDR as a service solution. We at ForgePoint are impressed by the Huntress team’s domain expertise, relentless drive, and passion to protect all customers from today’s advanced cyberthreats.”

The new funding round follows a previous infusion of $1.75 million from Gula Tech Adventures. Huntress ended 2019 with $5.2 million in revenue, a considerable achievement for a company with just 20 employees. The company plans to triple its team size over the next year, as well as ramp up sales and marketing efforts.